If you want your blog to work for your business, then you need to have a strategy in place for your blog. In other words, your blogging should serve a purpose. In this blog post, I’m going to reveal:

Why a clear blogging strategy is essential to your business

I’ll introduce to you a concept called the Content Sales Funnel, and why it is important

Why traffic goals aren’t everything when it comes to blogging

The two options you have to choose from when writing any blog post

Getting A Clear Strategy For Your Blog

Too many businesses create a blog without a clear idea in mind about what the purpose is, and that sort of haphazard approach can be really damaging to your business.

Please note this post may contain affiliate links. Please refer to my disclosure for more information.

For a start, if blogging isn’t – ultimately – attracting customers to your business, it’s a waste of the precious time you are spending writing that content.

You need to think of blogging as one of your biggest marketing assets for your business. It is a marketing tool that, when done well, can bring you sales.

However, in order to use your blog to make sales and grow your business, it’s important that you understand what your big objective is for each blog post.

I’ll give you a clue: there are two options. And what I’m going to suggest to you is that you should craft every blog post by deciding on one of two key objectives.

Do this, and you can be sure that your blogging time isn’t wasted, but that your next blog post is the perfect one for your business.

Blogging and the Content Sales Funnel

I mentioned in the introduction that a blog post can bring you sales. So let’s break that down a little bit, because it’s unlikely that a stranger will happen upon your blog post for the first time and suddenly decide to buy from you (they might, but it’s rare).

What is more likely is that your blog post will be a tool that pushes your potential customer through a sales funnel. Kind of like this:

Step 1: Generate awareness (traffic)

Step 2: Generate new subscribers (leads)

Step 3: Generate prospects (interested leads)

Step 4: Generate sales (customers)

Content sales funnel

It’s Not Always About Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

So at what stage in the process will your blog post be aimed at? Well, the standard answer is that a blog post is there to generate new traffic to your website.

But I actually disagree with this. I think that a good quality blog post is so much more than this. A good blog post will strengthen your brand, give you authority and build trust with your audience. And those types of benefits come much further down the sales funnel than simply generating new traffic.

This gives bloggers a dilemma: Who are you writing your blog post for? Who is your audience?

A blog post aimed at generating new traffic will have a very different feel to it than one that’s written for a loyal audience of subscribers.

This is the big mistake that a lot of bloggers make when they are writing their post. They try to aim at both audiences, and fail at both.

Traffic Vs Trust

What’s the alternative? Here’s an idea. Instead of trying to create a blog post to please everybody, decide up front one of two key objectives for your post. Your post should either:

a) Build traffic, and be part of your strategic for bringing in a new audience. These posts are targeted at people who don’t know you, should be highly shareable, and tempting to read. b) Build trust, and be part of your strategy for nurturing and building a relationship with your existing audience.These posts should be more detailed, showcase your authority, and reveal something about you as a person.

Both are important, so it’s worthwhile creating a blogging strategy where you alternative between the two week after week.

Or, if you plan to spend the next month simply generating traffic, then make sure objective A is the one that is at the core of every blog post you publish during that month. Likewise, if you are planning a sales launch soon, you might want to focus on blogs that build trust instead.

Next Steps For You

Before drafting your next blog post, spend some time thinking about your key strategic goal for your business at the moment.

Are you trying to build an audience, or are you trying to establish trust with your existing audience?

Use this decision to form the structure of your blog post so it’s either highly clickable and shareable, or a more detailed, authoritative and personal post

In a future post, I’ll going to talk more about what types of content you want to include depending on whether you decide on strategy A or B. Keep an eye out for that, and make sure you’re on my mailing list so I can notify you when it’s published.